Meet McCain 'birthers': ABC, CBS, NBC, FactCheck, N.Y. Times, more

Many of the same news organizations and research groups today dismissing concerns about Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility were far more eager to cover the issue when Republican presidential candidate John McCain was the subject.

An archive search shows the question of McCain’s birth certificate and his eligibility to be president was actively pursued by Democratic Party activists and the mainstream media in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, despite the ridicule now heaped upon those questioning Obama’s qualifications under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution.

In an article published Feb. 28, 2008, months before McCain was nominated for president by the Republican Party, FactCheck.org, at the very center of Obama’s defense against eligibility questions, was itself raising them about McCain.

After the Republican and Democratic conventions, on, FactCheck.org weighed into the Obama eligibility debate Aug. 21, 2008,” claiming its “staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate.” The certificate in question, however, was a short-form Certification of Live Birth, or COLB, not a hospital-generated long-form birth certificate listing the hospital where Obama was born as well as other relevant birth information, including the name of the attending physician.

Almost coincident with the FactCheck.org article, a flurry of mainstream media news pieces popped up about McCain’s eligibility to be president.

On Feb. 28, 2008, Carl Hulse wrote a New York Times article, “McCain’s Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out.”

“To date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official birthplace outside the 50 states,” Hulse wrote.

“Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his advisers are doing their best to brush aside questions – raised in the liberal blogosphere – about whether he is qualified under the Constitution to be president,” Williams wrote. “But many legal scholars and government lawyers say it’s a serious question with no clear answer.”

Then, on April 11, 2008, the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog published a piece noting that Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., introduced a non-binding resolution expressing McCain qualifies as a natural-born citizen under terms of the Constitution.

The Leahy-McCaskill resolution, ultimately passed by the Senate unanimously was co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who at the time were competing for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Even this was not enough to stop liberal activists and the mainstream media from continuing to keep alive questions about McCain’s eligibility.

In a Washington Post story May 2, 2008,
reporter Michael Dobbs questioned whether the Senate’s unanimously passed resolution was sufficient to settle the matter of whether McCain was a natural-born citizen eligible to be president.

Dismissing the Senate resolution, Dobbs wrote that the Senate vote “is simply an opinion that has little bearing on an arcane constitutional debate that has preoccupied legal scholars for many weeks.”

Dobbs noted at the time the article was published “three pending cases are challenging McCain’s right to be president” because even though both his parents were U.S. citizens, his father was in the Navy, and McCain was born at the U.S. Naval Station based in Coco Solo in the Panama Canal Zone on Aug. 29, 1939.

While acknowledging that a senior official of the McCain campaign had shown reporters a copy of McCain’s birth certificate issued by the Canal Zone hospital – something the Obama presidential campaign and presidency have so far refused to do – he questioned why McCain did not release the birth certificate to the press generally.

In addition to media scrutiny, McCain testified before a U.S. Senate committee and produced his long-form birth certificate for inspection.

PolitiFact repeated the Washington Post complaint that McCain had not released his hospital-generated birth certificate publicly, opting instead to “let a Washington Post reporter take a peek at it.”

PolitiFact, however, did not note that the Obama campaign refused all inquiries asking to see the Illinois senator’s hospital-generated long-form birth certificate.

PolitiFact also dismissed congressional resolutions affirming McCain’s eligibility to be president as a natural-born citizen, quoting Atlanta attorney Jill Pryor, who wrote a 20-year-old paper published in the Yale Law Journal in which she argued that Congress’ interpretation of the natural-born citizen clause is not binding on the courts.

On June 12, 2008, the left-leaning DailyKos.com posted a piece by blogger “andyfoland”, “The Bombshell on McCain’s Birth Certificate,” claiming McCain had “no interest in releasing his birth certificate” because he “actually wasn’t born in the United States,” and “McCain has done a good job keeping the public at large from catching on that he was born in Panama.”

Displaying what he claimed was a copy of McCain’s hospital-generated long-form birth certificate, Robberson wrote, “The argument is very strong against McCain being regarded ‘a natural-born’ citizen’ as required by law.”

Why?

“[McCain] was born in Panama in 1936, at a time when the State Department and the Hay-Bunau Treaty, which granted the U.S. access to the Panama Canal Zone, specifically stated that the Canal Zone was not sovereign U.S. territory,” Robberson argued.

To drive home the point, a link in Robberson’s piece displayed as a .pdf file the lawsuit papers filed by plaintiff Fred Hollander in the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire questioning McCain’s eligibility.

“As much as we’d like to dismiss this one as just another frivolous election season rumor, it’s impossible to make any definitive statement about Senator McCain’s presidential eligibility because the issue is a matter of law rather than fact, and the law is ambiguous,” Snopes.com wrote.

Third-party presidential candidate Alan Keyes was excoriated for bringing a federal lawsuit challenging Obama’s eligibility, but as the Law.com article pointed out, Keyes had also brought the U.S. District court challenge of McCain’s eligibility.

Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, the Web continued to buzz with stories questioning McCain’s eligibility without reporting similar issues were being raised about Obama.